The following folders contain various databases for OOTP 2007 that will allow you to import Japanese players, or play historical seasons in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), either as a stand-alone league or in concert with a historical MLB.  Most of this information was culled from Michael Westbay and Michael Eng's Japanese baseball databases at www.japanesebaseball.com, an excellent source for Japanese baseball information.  I also used an older attempt at a Lahman import (Chuck's OOTP JPL files) as well.  Many thanks to them for all their work.

First, I'll describe what's in these folders.  (But if you want to go straight to the directions on how to use this, scroll down to INSTRUCTIONS FOR RUNNING CONCURRENT NPB AND MLB HISTORICAL SEASONS.)

1_Raw_NPB

This folder contains the actual NPB stats that I've been able to find, starting with the first professional season in Japanese baseball (1937) and continuing to the 2006 season.  Batting and pitching statistics are fairly intact.  However, there are huge gaps in what I've been able to find for fielding statistics (as things are extremely spotty pre-1992).  In order to deal with this, players have dummy fielding entries with no fielding stats.  

These players also do not have positional information that I could glean from other databases.  So famous players from the 30s to approximately 1990 have correct positions.  However, lesser known players have essentially a random position.  (If you leave position blank, the game seems to import everyone as a first basemen).  If anyone has NPB fielding stats that are not in this database, please PM me (murmur13) at the OOTP forums.

2_NPBwMLBeq_Start

This folder contains two folders: NPB and MLB.  The NPB folder contains the same information as in 1_Raw_NPB, with the following additions:

1) NPB batting and pitching statistics have been converted to thieir major league equivalencies (MLEs), based on Jim Albright's NPB to MLB conversion factors.  Articles describing how these factors were derived can be found for...

Batting: http://baseballguru.com/jalbright/analysisjalbright19.html
Pitching: http://baseballguru.com/jalbright/analysisjalbright26.html

For reference, here are the adjustment factors used:

Batting:
Hits .932
Doubles .980
Triples 1.577
Homers .604
Walks .805

Pitching:
Hits 1.076
Homers 1.236
Walks 1.072
Strikeouts .884

2) MLB stats for any player that has appeared in NPB.  For example, for Ichiro Suzuki, this database has his MLEs for the Orix BlueWave, and his stats for the Mariners.  

The MLB folder contains the Lahman MLB database, along with the converted NPB statistics for anyone in NPB that has played in MLB.

So, both the MLB and NPB folders have full career stats for players that have played in both NPB and MLB.  The MLB folder also has players that have ONLY plyaed in MLB, and the NPB folder has players that have ONLY played in NPB.

This folder can easily be used to start a historical, concurrent NPB and MLB.  However, each database has an Ichiro, a Matsui, a Petagine, etc.  So if you use these databases to import rookies, then there will be multiples of any MLB players that have played in NPB.  

3_NPBwMLBeq_Import

This folder is to be used to import rookies in a historical league.  The data in these two databases (NPB and MLB) are exactly the same as in 2_NPBwMLB_Start.  However, all career statistics for Japanese players or foreign players that ONLY played in NPB are in the NPB folder.  Any non-Japanese player with MLB experience has his full stats in the MLB folder.  This will allow, for example, Ichiro to be available in the Japanese draft (but not the MLB draft), and players like Petagine, Tuffy Woods, Cabrera to be available in the MLB draft.  

INSTRUCTIONS FOR RUNNING CONCURRENT NPB AND MLB HISTORICAL SEASONS

1. Click on "Add historical league", and select the master.csv file in \2_NPBwMLBeq_Start\NPB.  NOTE that it may be problematic to start earlier than 1958.  From 1937-1949, NPB was one league, and from 1950-1957, there were uneven teams in each league.  The default import has problems with these setups.  (However, if anyone knows a fix/workaround, PM me and I'll include it in this file.)

Go to the structure tab.  When importing the league, it will import as an American (USA) league.  Change the league nationality to Japan.  However, when you do this, it will change team cities, so you might want to remember the cities/company names in order to reset them correctly.  (Also note that the team names will NOT automatically update as you play...so for example, the Taiyo Whales will remain as the Taiyo Whales throughout history and never change to the Yokohama Bay Stars unless you do it manually.)

Go to the Names and Affiliations tab.  Note that the league names are AL and NL.  This is because the game WILL NOT import teams unless they're AL or NL.  So change the league names: AL is the Pacific League (DH), NL is the Central League (no DH).  (Also, the Japanese version of the Cy Young Award is the Sawamura Award...all other award names are the same).

Go to the Rules tab.  Please make sure to DISABLE "automatically expand league".  So far, expansion DOES NOT work with this database.  Again, future releases may have instructions on how to fix this.  

If you want to setup foreign player limits, you can (NPB is 4 players).  However, note two things.  First, you MUST specify the foreign pitcher and hitter limit.  If you don't set this, it will ignore the player limits.  Second, AI teams will sometimes get around this by putting extra foreign players on their reserve or AAA squads.  So far, I am not aware of any current fix for this.

2. Click on "Add historical league, and select the master.csv file in \2_NPBwMLBeq_Start\MLB.

3. Tweak settings as you'd like (finances, foreign player limits, etc.).  If you want to have separate financials in NPB and MLB (which makes sense, as the highest paid player in MLB makes about triple the highest paid player in NPB, and there's a similar gap in total payroll), I would suggest disabling "Import adjusted financial settings after each year".  The bad thing about this is that payroll and salaries won't increase year after year.  The good thing is that you can set NPB payrolls to (hopefully) affect NPB free agent signing behavior (i.e. lower payroll, sign poorer players from MLB).

If you do this, here are some suggested numbers under Rules/Financial Rules

Avg attendance	25000
Avg ticket	$15.00
Min years FA	9
Sign FA/oth lg	yes
FAs may leave	yes (unforutnately, no posting system)
Draft comp	yes
Arbitration	disable
Avg media	3,000,000 (note: teams like hanshin and yomiuri should be much higher)
Fixed media	no
Salary cap	no
Team owner cont	yes
Revenue share	no
Cash max	$5,000,000 (at your discretion, however, most profitable NPB teams send profits to their parent company, teams not sitting on huge cash reserves)

Minimum		$40,000
Superstar	$6,500,000
Star		$4,500,000
Good		$2,000,000
Above Avg	$1,000,000
Average		$615,500
Below Avg	$300,000
Fair		$100,000
Poor		$50,000

Also, some other suggested settings for NPB:

Rules

Expanded Roster Size	disabled
Secondary Roster Size	28
Minimum Days Service	145
Waiver Period		disabled
DFA length		10 (no DFA in NPB)
Minor League Opt Yrs	disabled
Rule 5 Draft		disabled

Trade deadline		July 24th
Trade w/other MLs	disabled
Draft pick trading	disabled

Amateur draft		enabled
Amateur draft		November 15th
Draft rounds		6-10

Options

Season start date	March 24th
Force start/weekday	Saturday
Games per team		146
Sched balance		disable
Typical series length	3
Interleague play	Enabled

4. Start game.

5. If you're interested in importing historical rookies...
5a. Go to Game setup.  Then click on the League Setup tab.  Choose your NPB league.  Click on the rules tab.  Go down to Historical Rookies Options, and set the following path:

your directory\NPB_DB\3_NPBwMLBeq_Import\NPB

5b. Do the same as above for your MLB league.  Set the following path:

your directory\NPB_DB\3_NPBwMLBeq_Import\MLB

6. The final step, and this is IMPORTANT.  When starting the game, any player that has played in both MLB and NPB will appear in BOTH leagues.  So search for any duplicates (usually do a search for foreigners on NPB teams, and then do a search on that player name), and delete the duplicate that is NOT on a roster.  You only have to do this once, after you start the game.  

That's it.  Enjoy.  If you have any questions, please post in the OOTP forums.  